So.. where were you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Where were you during / when you found out about some of the “larger” news events in our history?

I’m young enough to only have a few memories, but oddly enough, I DO remember them specifically. At the time, I remember being told that I’d always remember where I was and what I was doing when they happened. How right my parents were.

When Princess Diana was killed, I was on AOL, in a chat room, playing a game. A couple others had apparently been watching the news, because all at once people began talking about the accident.

On 9/11 I, like most other high school kids, was in my first period class - Psychology - and we were discussing Operant Conditioning. One of the Government teachers was running down the hall alerting all of the classes about what had happened to the first tower, so we switched on CNN. It wasn’t very long after the accident. Then we watched the second Tower get hit, and both fall. During our second period, the principal made an announcement regarding the attacks, and classes were pretty much dead for the rest of the day. We just watched the news while doing busywork.

2

When Princess Diana was killed, my brother and I were watching Beavis and Butthead… we mostly did that to horrify our mom. :smiley: After the show, we were flipping channels to figure out what to see next. Almost every channel seemed to be showing the same thing: a wrecked car with commentary about it. We decided to hear what it was all about.

On 9/11, I was at home preparing to go out and meet a friend somewhere for a get-together. I heard on the radio that all MLB games were cancelled, and wondered why that was. Figuring that I’d hear about it later, I went to meet my friend. Everyone we encountered was talking about the attacks.

F_X

3

At the time when Princess Diana was killed, I was sitting around in my kitchen with a whole heap of friends drinking. We were all half-drunk and my long lost sister telephoned me to tell me the news. The party atmosphere was suddenly lost, there was absolute disbelief about what happened.

As for 9/11, I was sitting up at around 1.30am watching the late news. When I was watching what happened, at first I thought it was some crazy trailer of a new movie. Then, when I saw the second tower being hit I was absolutely shocked and stunned to realise that this was really happening. I sat up until dawn watching CNN still unable to comprehend what had happened.

4

The earliest “event” I remember is when the shuttle exploded. I think of it that way even though another has exploded since then. I was in junior high and it was before there was a TV in every classroom. My homeroom teacher had requested one to follow the launch since he taught History and felt it was apt course material. He told other teachers, some of whom did not really believe him since he was known as a practical joker around school. We spent the rest of the day comparing rumors we’d heard and hoping the clock would move faster so we could go home and see the news ourselves.

I remember watching the start of the first Gulf War and thinking the reporters were insane while they gave their live reports from under the table in their hotel.

I can’t say I registered Diana’s death as anything more than another celebrity I didn’t care about.

I spent September 11, 2001 home with my 4 month old daughter watching TV horrified at the video. I spent much of the morning on the phone with my mother who was at work and they had no TV so I was their news outlet. Around 2 I went to pick up my husband since he couldn’t take his regular train home from work.

The eeriest thing was the lack of planes in the sky and knowing there were only the military jets. I wondered if this was only the beginning and if soon we would have tanks in the streets too like you see on the news.

5

When Princess Diana died, I was at my friends house taking part in an illicit party (with boys…ohhhh…). My mom called to tell me the news.

On 9/11 I was sleeping at my boyfriend’s dad’s house in Maui. I woke up and wandered into the kitchen for coffee when I saw one of the towers down on the news. I ran in to tell my boyfriend “they knocked down the world trade center somehow”. We watched the TV and learned that I had saw an old clip and both the towers were actually down.

6

When I heard President Reagan had been shot, I was smoking in the boys’ room in High School. I can remember asking “Is he dead?” I don’t remember the answer exactly, something negative in reply, and I can remember being very disappointed. Even in the 10th grade, I could tell he was a very skilled liar.

When the first shuttle exploded, I was in college, waiting for my circuits analysis class to begin, and someone came in and turned on the TV.

On September 11, 2001, I heard about the tragedies in NY and DC on NPR as I drove to work. I spent the entire day reading about events on the internet. I didn’t see any video of the planes striking the WTC until I got home that evening, and I can remember being extremely frustrated that all they showed was the same two-second clips, like video bites, and not showing longer stretches of unedited tape.

When the second shuttle was lost, early this year, I woke up to the clock radio playing an AM station and the news person saying “we’re still waiting for the shuttle to appear, it’s overdue.” And I hit the snooze and half-dreamt that they were landing at Edwards, and listening for the sonic boom. When I got out of bed about a half hour later, I turned on the TV to pictures of the fireball over Texas. My legs fell out from under me.

7

9/11: same place I am now, at work. At least until they sent everyone home.

Challenger disaster: in the high school locker room, either chaging for or after PhysEd.

8

When the big earthquake hit California in 1992 (between 6.9 and 7.6 on the Richter scale, depending on who you quote), I was standing on a table cleaning a light fixture. Originally being from Minnesota, I had never been in an earthquake before, so needless to say I was scared out of my mind. I remember watching the marina district burn to the ground from the window of the place I was staying at the time. Not something I would ever want to go through again, but it was definitely a great experience which I will never forget.

9

I’m cursed with a very good memory. I can remember where I was for all these events, trivial and otherwise. Unfortunatly, none of them worth the bother to tell anyone about.

Both shuttles cock-ups
Reagan getting shot
Lennon getting shot
Ford getting not shot
Kurt Cobain’s first suicide attempt
Flight 007
Flight (other one off the coast, electrical short)
Kennedy augering in
Denver augering in
Northridge Quake
Small, but noticable quake in my small, meaningless town
When it snowed on Forth of July

But…I have no memory of what stunt I was pulling when Diana snuffed it. Probably because I couldn’t have cared less about it.

BCS stands for (illegitimite child) + (crowing rooster) + (Tootsie Pops)

10

You’re all class.

Challenger disaster – I was in elementary school, and a couple of the classes in my grade went to the library to watch the takeoff. We saw the whole thing as it happened.

9/11 – I had been at the office late the night before, so I was sleeping in on the 11th. My radio alarm went off, and the announcer came on, saying something about the President. Wham! I hit the snooze. When I finally crawled out of bed, it occured to me that it was odd that the radio announcer was talking about the President, so I left it on while I showered. The announcers were talking about what was going on in very vague terms. So when I got out of the shower, I flipped on the tube. I had literally watched about 10 seconds when then the first tower came down. As soon as I got to work and turned on my computer, they evacuated the building. I spent the rest of the day in front of the television.

11

9/11 - I was in bed and didn’t wake up until 5 hours after (NZ time). Didn’t realise it was real until the little newticker stated that works to that affect.

I think I was asleep during Challenger too.

Diana’s Crash - In the kitchen, eating lunch.

While the Australian entrant into the Amercia’s Cup snapped in half and sank, I was reading the newspaper. Spent the next 10 minutes laughing.

12

Diana’s crash - I was in the middle of moving into my first apartment. The first thing I saw when I got the tv hooked up was coverage of the crash.

9/11 - I was running late that morning, so I didn’t bother turning on the radio or tv before I left for school. While I was on the bus, I heard a couple of teenage boys discussing whether they would rebuild the WTC and wondered if something had happened, but quickly dismissed the thought, on the grounds that even if a bomb had gone off or something, those towers would never actually fall down. Arrived at the lab to find that a student who had beat me in had the radio turned up to full volume listening to coverage of the events, though I didn’t really grasp the full scale of things until I got home that evening and saw it all on tv.

13

9/11 - The night before, I had an incredibly hard time falling asleep. Strange for me. I jumped at every little sound, freaking out like crazy. Eventually I fell asleep.

When Cody came upstairs to tell me that the WTC were down (we’d woken up really early for us, and he’d only known about the 1st one at that point), I thought he was joking or something and fell back asleep.

Then my sister called around 2pm (remember, it took me a looong time to fall asleep) . In a haze, I asked her if something about buildings had happened. Then she went on to explain it, so I got off the phone and went to watch the news.

Went to work at B&N, listening to the news the whole time (although all the stations were news). Radio was on lud enough in the cafe (we were the only ones with a radio) so that the whole store could hear (great accoustics in that cafe, hehe). Given the complete lack of business, the store closed around 6.

Later that night, I remember hanging out at Denny’s with all my friends chatting about how this was bound to be the start of WWIII, and what would we do if they started a draft.

Yup.

14

Challenger: Heard about it during the current events discussion we had every morning (sixth grade) I was scared for the people who died.

Loma-Prieta Quake: I was sick with a fever, and had just finished flushing the toilet when I noticed the water was sloshing curiously. I thought I was hallucinating from the fever! Then my sister ran screaming out of her room. That’s when I noticed that not only was the water sloshing, the whole damn house was moving. That was weird…watched a house burn down right afterward - broken gas pipe or something.

Kurt Cobain: I was in San Diego, I think celebrating my sister’s graduation from UCSD. I remember thinking he finally got his wish. At the time I refused to buy “In Utero”, telling my friends I thought it was too depressing. Yeah, guess so.

Diana: Partying hard in college. Saw it on the TV when I went to watch The Simpsons. Very sad.

WTC: I was at work, living in Vermont at the time, so I watched it all real-time on the Bloomberg computer we had. I think we had three different news stations on all at once. I was so stunned I could barely think. I remember having trouble breathing that day sometimes just thinking about it. I worked for a financial analysis firm at the time, and we had quite a few clients who died that day. Thankfully, many survived. We even had to send some firms our copies of their records because theirs were all destroyed in the attacks.

15

I remember watching the news on most events.

One of my most vivid memories is of the OJ trial. We watched most of it on tv in my high school classroom and ran through the halls yelling when he was acquitted.

9/11 I was asleep in my bed in CA (I had moved to LA from Kansas City less than a month before) and woke up at 6 am with no idea why. Went and checked my cell for messages and found that my parents, best friend and boyfriend had called me about 500 times. Turned on the TV and watched news of the disaster for the next 10 hours. My producer called for the show I was working on, and the crew had decided to work that night. It was only my third or fourth day on the job but I got hugged when I came in that night.

That shoot had been plagued by airplane noise and we had to stop taping over and over to let a plane go by. It became kind of a joke. That night, we didn’t have to stop once. That was the creepiest thing.

Columbia Shuttle Crash I was playing Dungeons and Dragons and a friend called to tell us to turn on the news.

Challenger I remember watching it on the news that night. I don’t remember being told about it in class. (about 4th grade…)

Fall of the Berlin Wall I remember watching this on the news in my parents’ living room and saying to my mom, “this is history, isn’t it?”. I had been (and still am) fascinated by modern German history (WWII and forward) and this was HUGE for me.

16

Chernobyl, which I guess was a bigger deal in Poland than it was here - I was in the kitchen with my parents and my grandmother. I don’t think I understood what was going on, but suddenly everyone looked a little worried, and the next thing I know I’m not allowed to go outside and I can only drink powdered milk.

The O.J. verdict - I was in science class. For some reason, the whole trial affected my high school in a big way.

9/11 - In school, again. It was absolutely, positively the last day to get signed up for classes and internships, and there were hardly any spots left. I had gotten there extra-early and was going around getting referrals and signatures from teachers. Eventually, though, no one wanted to sign my papers anymore, and there were less and less people in the school. The ones that remained were crying. I finally got wind of what was happening, stepped outside, looked to my left, and saw the twin towers going up in smoke. Then I walked uptown.

17

Oh, right… the O.J. thing.

The White Bronco chase - was at home, watching on TV. We had popcorn. It was fun.

The verdict - in my 6th grade English class. The entire class wanted to know the verdict because the damn trial had taken so long, and our teacher told us that if we did our work, we could watch the news during the last 5 minutes of class. We did.

18

Chernobyl was an interesting one. I was working at the High Energy Physics lab in Boulder – CU’s astronomy group was using some lab space there. And since they had a decommissioned linear accelerator in the building, they kept geiger counters going constantly to monitor the background radiation level, in case anything hot got moved around or leaked or whatever.

Anyway, one day, the counters starting clicking at about 10 times background. The facilities staff combed the building looking for leaks or misplaced stuff… nothing. But the high background continued. They tested all the counters, and they all checked out fine.

After another 24 hours, Moscow released the news to the world. It was Chernobyl, halfway around the world, setting off our geiger counters.

Cool!

19

• Alan Shepard’s take-off. It was near the end of the school year and we had a TV in the class. I remember thinking, as I watched the lift-off, that this was real!

• JFK’s assassination. I’ve posted here several accounts of that; suffice to say that I was in the hospital at the time and was thus just watching TV all day - there was an initial announcement that the President had been shot, and video caught up a bit later with the first video I remember being rather chaotic footage from outside of Parkland Hospital. The next few days were a collage of events.

• A friend and I were entering The Groove record shop when another friend came running out. He was upset because his sister was a student at UT and someone had the campus pinned down, shooting people from the Tower. We went in and watched the owner’s TV for a bit. Not much to see, but we were definitely buzzed.

• At a high school football game, word spread that Jimi Hendrix was dead. I was in the gym parking lot when someone told my group. I don’t remember anyone acting particularly bereaved, but we were generally a bit shocked.

• In the U’Tote’Em at the corner of Drexel and Westheimer, in Houston, I was buying a case of beer when Neil Armstrong made his first footstep on the Moon. I watched it on a TV the clerk had up on the counter. My friends out in the car wanted to know what took me so long (they thought I might’ve been nailed for an ID).

• I was in my high school’s political science class when someone told us about the National Guard shootings at Kent State. We were stunned, and really just talked about it, then wandered off to get hard news.

• Hitchhiking down Highway 1 in Northern California, I got picked up by a guy from Berkeley (in a VW van, of course). Listening to the radio, we heard that the NY Times had published a secret report about the Vietnam war. It was all very confusing at first, but we knew it was something big. This was the start of the Pentagon Papers saga.

• I was exiting the West Loop at San Felipe (northbound) in the florist’s delivery truck I drove for a living when I first heard the news of the Watergate burglars. I was astounded, but that story took a little while to build up steam.

• My off-and-on-again girlfriend had deigned that I might visit her for a moment at her parent’s house in El Lago, Texas - that’s where I watched President Nixon resign and climb into the helicopter and fly away.

• Visiting a friend’s ranch, I’d run into town (Moshiem, Texas) and picked up the local rag at a tiny grocery store. As I stood in the parking lot, I read a brief story behind which I knew there had to be more. It was a sketchy report of a U.S. Congressman having been killed at an airstrip in Guyana. That was Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple debacle coming to light.

• It was very early in the still dark morning, whenever it was in 1980, when I just happened to wake up and turn on the radio in time to catch a snippet telling us that there had been a failed rescue mission aimed at freeing the Tehran hostages, several casualties, more to follow. I was bummed out.

• I had only just started my post-college career when our draftsman came in to my office wide-eyed and said, “Reagan’s been shot!” A senior geologist soon after came to my office, absolutely pissed off, to speculate about the perpetrator. Who could’ve guessed the story behind that one?

• One day I was sitting at my desk, working, when I heard my secretary shriek in the next office. She ran in to tell me that the space shuttle had blown up. I remember thinking that they probably hadn’t even hit the water yet. At lunch I went to the department store across Main Street and stood, in silence, with about 200 other people, watching ~30 televisions replay the explosion video. I went back to my office and cabled the President my condolences and a “stay the course” message of encouragement regarding the space exploration program.

• 9/11 - One of my co-worker’s wife called to tell us that a plane had crashed into the WTC. We turned on the TV in the drilling VP’s office and just sat and watched. As I recall, there was just a video focussed on the tower, with very sparse commentary. Just as my boss, who was in town for the day, entered, the second plane hit. While many of us (including myself) had up to that moment considered it possibly a tragic accident, we all instantly flashed to what it meant when the second plane arrived. Well, after a split-second of cognitave dissonance (Was that an Instant Replay?).

My boss immediately went to another office to call about his return flight that evening and was told that there were three other hijacked flights in the air. He came back and assembled us for the meeting. We hadn’t been at it very long when a geologist came in and told us they’d hit the Pentagon. My boss closed the office and gathered a few of us to come with him to a restaurant to attempt a meeting. After a short while of just watching the big screen TVs there, we adjourned to our District Landman’s house.

There have, of course, been many other events during my life that I recall, but I’ve been trying to honor the OP’s request for those wherein I can truly remember where I was and what I was doing when first alerted that big news was coming down.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I’m struck by how many have mentioned Princess Diana’s death. That never made my 'scope, but then my parents were the age I am now when Jimi Hendrix died, and I’m not sure they noticed that.

20

Oh, and the other day I remember well was the day the Rodney King verdict was delivered… also known as the first night of the LA Riots.

I work in Pomona and live in Pasadena, and when I got to Pasadena that evening, the air smelled like burnt rubber. My tank was on E, and I needed gas, so I pulled into a Chevron and I was the last customer they admitted… they closed up the station after that… a 24-hour station.

And then I needed some smokes… I tried several grocery stores, but they were all closed and Police were outside each one. I offered to help somehow… making sandwiches at the station, or something… and they just rudely told me to go home.

So I found a convenience store, bought a 12-pack and a bottle of vodka, three packs of smokes, and holed up in my house for two days, watching LA burn on TV.

After that, I swore off local news, especially KNBC. The fearmongering just went over the top after the riots. It still is. I’ll watch KABC for weather, but aside from that, I get my news on the internet.